Sugar by Candice Louisa Daquin

When the bird died, being newly born 
He shriveled fast, face blanching
Eyes turning putrid green, bulging from luminescent sockets
It was a quiet horror for a child without tongue
Who loved to pick the stamen from unripe flowered heart
And watch petals resist intrusion 
Feeling guilty for spreading pollen on her fingers
The enticement of perfect closure, beguiling 
An urgency to open and inhale, in a city without perfume
Where baby birds lay fallow, chalky small bones, without burial 
Nobody cared, they read comic books and twanged 
Girls’ elastic with a SNAP turning their cheeks 
Red in shame, boys not yet men, testing boundaries
In that idle lazy way of knowing themselves lions
Girls bitter with each other even before puberty
Chewing on lip-gloss and idle glances backward 
She recoils from it all, a pantomime, absurdity
Preferring to bury the bird where she imagines
It may find solace from living, a dreaming void
Her own manacles forgotten as she bends beneath
The weeping willow, tasked in thought
Does life begin or end when we are conscious? 
They would laugh if they saw her tears 
Pinch her until she fought back, because she is a fighter, she’s had to be …
And now, thinking on this, years laden like stones
Hungry ants climbing on scarred kitchen table
Stamped out before they sting -  in their insistence for sugar 
As she types her mind into translation
Vase of days cupped like pendulum cut from chain
Her body touched by men, and women and time
The marks like children’s fingers in butter
She sits in the scalding bath she was told to avoid
It will cause premature wrinkling, it will swallow youth
She laughs, another line forming, another moment
In hours collapsing in print, in volumes, behind her eyes
When she washes fading limbs and sees through them
The sticky knit together transparency
Of one who is only born to sleep
She walks beneath snow filled trees
Tasting the air of death and rebirth 
Hearing her mother say she loved her
Even as those words were treacle, burning
On a stove top, untended, dislocated 
Her own womb a chrysalis of time
When her friends send photos of children
She thinks of the flowers she pinched as a girl
Tasting their creation before they opened
Perhaps the sun would have teased them 
Wide and flung with seeking and longing 
When all she ever did was find ways to survive
The potency of soil behind her eyes
A bird not permitted flight
She died in her crouch to save
That hope, surviving, that fragile thimble
Quavering in light 

Candice Louisa Daquin is an Egyptian/French Sephardi immigrant to America, working as a Psychotherapist and Editor. Daquin co-edited The Kail Project and SMITTEN, two award-winning poetry anthologies from Indian women poets and lesbian poets respectively. She worked in publishing for many years in Europe. Her latest book Tainted by the Same Counterfeit is due out September 2022 by Finishing Line Press. www.thefeatheredsleep.com